As part of the Worm Cult seasons, the developers at Zenimax are changing how you engage in dialogues with the characters from Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls Online. A first taste is already live.
What is changing? Since the release in April 2014, The Elder Scrolls Online has relied on fully voiced dialogues, where you can sometimes make decisions or trigger actions like bribing or intimidating your counterpart.
With the Worm Cult seasons and the concurrently released Update 46, this dialogue system is set to be revised for the first time in June after eleven years. The response options will gain an additional layer, allowing you to respond more nuanced and express your emotions freely.
The gameplay trailer for the Worm Cult seasons of ESO:
Project Narrative Director Bill Slavicsek explains this in the official announcement on elderscrollsonline.com:
The response choices offer players in the role-playing game a broader range of reactions. In key moments of certain quests, we open up the opportunity for you to respond to an NPC in various ways. This elicits a different reaction from the NPC and can sometimes even influence the course or outcome of a quest. […]
Our neutral tone response will always be offered, but now we also include other options, mainly friendly and grim. With ‘friendly’, the player can express support or empathy for the NPC, while with ‘grim’, one responds in a darker, stricter manner.
However, your hero’s tone in Elder Scrolls Online is not limited to just neutral, grim, or friendly. Also “gracious, ruthless, joking, and flirtatious” will be supported in certain situations.
So you don’t have to guess what emotion a dialogue option is meant to convey, the corresponding response lines will be highlighted by different symbols – as this screenshot shows:
The new dialogue options will not be available in every conversation with an NPC, but far more often than before, where players could actually influence the behavior of NPCs or the outcome of a quest through dialogue.
The focus will not only be on important key moments of stories but also on encounters with beloved characters that players have repeatedly met over the past decade.
The secret is that we have often played around with recurring characters in the past years. When you flirted with Naryu, Darien, or Jakarn, we were testing the waters. When players were angry with Eveli Sharp-Arrow during the main story of “Orsinium” or showed understanding for her, we let them use the variation of our familiar neutral responses since it fit at that point in the story.
Project Narrative Director Bill Slavicsek via elderscrollsonline.com
Where can I experience the system live? With the announcement of the Worm Cult seasons, the accompanying prologue quest has been released, leading up to the return of Molag Bal’s followers. During the quest, you will encounter a wounded Worm Cultist from whom you want to extract information. For this, various approaches are available to you, which you control through your responses.
With the first season of Elder Scrolls Online and Update 46, even more exciting innovations are coming to Tamriel. For instance, the subclasses that give you over 3,000 combination possibilities for the skill lines. You can learn more about this here: The MMORPG to Elder Scrolls is soon getting 3,000 classes
